New York City crematories are extending their hours, burning bodies into the night. The state has started a running tally of all cremations and burials. City officials are surveying upstate cemeteries for temporary interment sites.
FILE PHOTO: A hospital worker attempts to block visual access as a deceased person is tended to in a temporary morgue outside of Brooklyn Hospital Center during the coronavirus disease outbreak in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, U.S., April 1, 2020. REUTERS/Andrew Kelly/File Photo
“We’ve been preparing for a worst-case scenario,” said Mike Lanotte, executive director of the New York State Funeral Directors Association, “which is in a lot of ways starting to materialize.” “No one could really imagine this happening,” said J.P. Di Troia, president of Fresh Pond Crematory in Queens, calling the pandemic among the most devastating events in his 52 years in business.
That backlog is trickling down to hospitals. The Brooklyn Hospital Center said in a statement on Tuesday that the bodies of deceased patients were spending more time than usual in its morgues because “grieving families cannot quickly make arrangements.” “It’s not a crashing system. We do have plans in place if there needs to be release of capacity from the city to more outlying areas,” Fleming said.
In normal times inmates from city jails each week bury some 25 New Yorkers there. But the number of burials on Hart jumped in the last week of March to 72, according to Jason Kersten, a spokesman at the Department of Correction, which oversees the island. Kersten referred questions about causes of death to OCME, which did not respond.The pandemic is taking a toll on the funeral industry’s clientele, too - an emotional one.
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